


wraithlike

by eleutheria_has_won



Series: Prompt Me! fills [6]
Category: The Underland Chronicles - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, Grief, Loss, Platonic Relationships, War Orphans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-04
Updated: 2015-05-04
Packaged: 2018-03-29 02:02:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3878173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleutheria_has_won/pseuds/eleutheria_has_won
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The palace is haunted by the things they don't talk about.</p><p>"ooh. Can I have a platonic Howard and Nerissa?"</p><p>[[From a Prompt Me! on thecityofregalia.tumblr.com . Head there if you want to submit a prompt of your own.]]</p>
            </blockquote>





	wraithlike

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadyoftheShield](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyoftheShield/gifts).



There are things people don’t talk about. Like all the many, many soldiers who die in battle, and all the children left without a parent or two, all the damage this never-ending cycle of grudge and grief does to their people, and gee, isn’t it suspicious how the king and queen and the king’s younger brother and his wife all manage to die at the same time in the same incident, leaving only children in need of a steward left for the throne?

There’s the way the palace is haunted by a pale, thin wraith, and her name is Nerissa. First her parents were dead, and then her brother - the traitor, who is also not talked about - was dead and now Nerissa is dead. She’s a ghost, a shade, who wanders the halls with her omens and visions.

There are mist stories about the ghosts of wailing women, their crimes unspoken, who wander forever in misery. Nerissa, mostly, is silent. 

And then there’s the time when Howard is at loose ends, wandering the palace, and finds his way to the room of prophecy, only to hear the soft weeping of every ghost woman, out of any story ever told.

Nerissa is a pale little shadow in one corner of a very big, very cold, very lifeless room. “I miss my brother,” she whispers with her hands splayed over her face to hide. “Don’t tell.”

Howard is struck by the notion, all of the sudden, that he is the sole living being in this room. 

“Okay,” he says, “I won’t tell,” and then instead of fleeing this place of Hades, he gets down on the ground and sits, and puts his arm around Nerissa’s waifish (skeletal) shoulders. She pitches against him with a soft, quavering wail, like a banshee who’s screamed for so long it has no screaming left. With cold mist the breath of the dead and the clammy stone the touch of unliving hands, the dark seeps around him, but the warmth of living veins keeps it out. Nerissa is clammy-cool to the touch. She’s been surrounded by death too long; she’s forgotten how to be alive and keep it out.

Howard sits, warm and alive in the gloom, his arm around a ghost girl’s shoulders, and for an hour or so he communes with the dead.


End file.
